GÉZA FREUD was born in 1922 in Budapest. He graduated from Pázmány Péter University in 1940, and obtained a master's degree in electrical engineering at the Technical University of Budapest in 1950. In 1952 he became a member of the Mathematical Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (now Alfréd Rényi Institute). In 1954 he defended his PhD thesis and received the Grünwald Prize for his work on Tauberian theorems. In 1956 he became a Doctor of Mathematical Sciences after defending his thesis on asymptotic expansion of orthogonal polynomials. In 1959 he was awarded the Kossuth Prize, the highest disctinction in Hungary. In 1974 he left Hungary. After several years of uncertainty, in 1976 he got a tenure position in Columbus, Ohio, where he died in 1979.
Although he worked in several areas of mathematics (like differential equations), his most important contributions are to approximation theory. In his monograph "Orthogonal Polynomials" (Akadémiai Kiadó, 1970) he developed the theory of one-sided polynomial approximation. Another famous discovery of his is the so-called Freud weight which is a generalization of the Hermite weight. In this connection he initiated the use of infinite-finite range inequalities which became a standard technique for handling problems on infinite intervals.
Colloquium lecture by J. Szabados: "The Life and Work of Géza Freud"
(in presence of Freud's first wife and daughter)
Participants of the Workshop:
V. Anagnostopoulos (Athens, Greece), Dávid Benkô (Texas A & M College Station), E. Berdisheva (Erlangen), Z. Ditzian (Edmonton), Tamás Erdélyi (Texas A & M College Station), András Kroó (Rényi Institute), M. Koloantzakis (Iraklion), David Kubayi (Johannesburg), D. Mache (Dortmund), Phillip Mashele (Johannesburg), Giuseppe Mastroianni (Potenza), H. Mhaskar (Los Angeles), L. Milev (Sofia), Szilárd Révész (Rényi Institute), Y. Sarantopoulos (Athens, Greece), József Szabados (Rényi Institute), Péter Vértesi (Rényi Institute), Y. Xu (Eugene, Oregon, USA).